During the infancy of the World Wide Web (herein “the Web”), documents transferred via hypertext protocol (“HTTP”) were frequently static and unchanging over long periods of time. However, as the web evolved, website were more frequently updated and linked to live databases. These new websites became dynamic, changing their displayed output as the linked database was updated. In most cases, database driven web sites maintained a consistent appearance. The tables, colors, fonts and other layout and formatting options were the same. However, the information placed within the layouts would change. Modern development tools such as Microsoft's ASP.NET provides tools to rapidly construct web pages dynamically linked to backend databases.
For the average web users, viewing dynamic data is a convenience. Users check changing stock prices, sports scores, headlines, weather conditions and the like.
In addition, many valuable databases are placed online so that anonymous users have limited access to their resources. The end user must type in a query in a web form which is then assembled into a query string. A SQL string is constructed from the information on the web form and the results are displayed. Sophisticated users and programmers sometimes write applications that “mine” a publicly accessible database to collect the contents of the database for their own use. Although some may question the ethics or legality of such database mining, it is important to note the underlying technology is known as “screen scraping.” In other words, the software application uses complex string handling routines to locate dynamically changing data on a website and store the results. Screen scraping has existed well before the advent of the web. Many terminal modes such as 3270, used to connect to mainframes, were “scraped” of data at predetermined locations on the display screen.
To develop such a screen scraping application for the web a programmer will typically examine the HTML source code of the web page near the data element sought to be mined. The programmer will find a string of alphanumeric characters that consistently appears next to the target data element and use that string as a reference point. For example, if an HTML tag calls for a table cell to be a certain background color, the programmer may have the application look for that tag, go three lines down, twenty characters across and copy the next ten characters to a database field. A drawback of this method is that the author of the web page may change the page layout whereby the reference point is no longer valid.
For users with full vision, finding dynamically changing data is typically not a problem. Web sites designers attempt to display the information in a format easy to assimilate. However, visually impaired (also known as “low-vision”) users often have difficultly finding a particular portion of a web page. While screen readers assist the visually impaired user by reading the output of a web page, a low-vision user may only want to hear about certain dynamically changing data on a web page. For example, a screen reader on a financial website may take a couple minutes to read the content between the top of the page and the current value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the “Dow”). A low-vision user may want to periodically check the Dow to see if the applicable stocks are going up or down for the day. It would be cumbersome to force the user to listen to other content on the page when all he or she wants to know about is the current value of the Dow. Although this information could be “scraped” by examining the HTML source code, writing a custom application for each individual website would also be cumbersome for the low-vision user.
As a user moves though an HTML document downloaded from the Internet with a screen reader, he may want to return to a previously read portion of the document. Unfortunately, currently available screen readers do not provide the capability to return to a specified place within the document, such as a word or line. Instead, the user must return to the beginning of the document and search for the desired location. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a capability to mark the text of a HTML document with a tag and to be able return to the tagged portion of the text in the future upon demand.
What is needed is a method to locate where dynamically changing information appears on a web page whereby a screen reader can quickly provide the information to the low-vision user.
Another need in the art is for a method of finding the location of this information without requiring the end user to engaging in complex string handing routines.